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A transplanted Southern Californian living in North Dakota Idaho, with some insights on life with deaf dogs, a gluten free spouse, and the occasional mischievous garden gnome. Thank you for visiting and I hope you enjoy.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Fall Garden Pictures - Apples and Marigolds

It's Fall here in North Dakota, both the calendar and the weather are attesting to this fact. We have had a long stretch of warm and dry weather, which has extended our growing season a good two to three weeks longer than normal. It's also been nice that cool temperatures have killed all the mosquitos and made outside work much more pleasant.

We finally got a hard frost (down to the mid to low 20's) over the last few nights, which means that we had to pull up our tomato and pepper plants. The more cold hardy beets and onions were able to stay outside for a few more days, but we pulled those as well yesterday and got busy pickling the beets and drying the onions.

Our zinnias, hostas, Monarda (beebalm), and coneflowers (echinacea) didn't make it through the hard freeze, but the marigolds and petunias are still going strong. The marigolds look pretty contrasted next to the brown foreground/background of fallen leaves. The orange flowers on the left are 'Golden Gem' Marigolds, with 'Inca Gold' Marigolds on the right side of the raised bed. These are regulars in our garden and we plant them in abundance every year.

More 'Inca Gold' Marigolds in front with 'Golden Gem' Marigolds in the back, along with onions and tomatoes and even a 'Paprika' Yarrow way in the back. We're big believers in flowers and plants that attract beneficial bugs; marigolds, yarrow, sweet alyssum, verbeena, petunias, etc. the list goes on. We intersperse them with all of our veggies and include them heavily in our annual flowerbed planting.

These are cherry tomatoes (Sweet 100) which produced prolifically this year. Believe it or not, there are only three tomato plants in that huge mass. This is probably the perfect location for them, along the garage wall, underneath a bit of the eaves, facing West. This site was a compost pile last year and has a large amount of well rotted compost and horse manure.

Our apples are just about ready to pick. These are Haralson or Haralred apples, I'm not sure. They can withstand a bit of frost, so we're going to leave them on the tree as long as possible to give them an opportunity to sweeten up a little more.

That's an update from the homestead in mid-October. We've been frantically busy around here and posting has been sparse, sorry. Plus honestly, the dogs just haven't been doing anything cute recently...so there hasn't been much to post about.

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All words and pictures on the blog are mine and the property of ME, please do not use them without my permission. If you ask (a simple e-mail is all), I'm more than likely to grant permission, but if you don't ask, well that'll make me grumpy.